Like this:

There is a line in a movie that I am not ashamed to admit I have seen way too many times* which goes:

“Typical isn’t it? You wait twenty years for a dad and then three come along at once.”
I feel a little like this right now. I’ve had several months of plugging away at a project with all the diligence of an AP English student (which is to say, very little diligence, but we fake it well), and now everything has kind of exploded in my face.

There is a line in a movie that I am not ashamed to admit I have seen way too many times* which goes:

“Typical isn’t it? You wait twenty years for a dad and then three come along at once.”

I feel a little like this right now. I’ve had several months of plugging away at a project with all the diligence of an AP English student (which is to say, very little diligence, but we fake it well), and now everything has kind of exploded in my face.

I titled this post ‘my three dads’ because there were three things that immediately jumped to mind, but then I’ve remembered a few more. It’s more like my three dads, plus a couple step-dads, and then that one creepy uncle.

So, of the original three, I’ve got the three huge projects I’ve been working on / brainstorming. I’ve basically been in genre fiction mode for quite a while now, which seems to put to bed (without supper!) my whole would-I-rather-write-genre-or-literary-fiction?

There are three novel-length things I’ve been picking through currently, and these are the aforementioned three dads. But let’s just be clear, there is nothing paternalistic about this other a fervent desire to make them proud of me.

By this weird token, I have another first draft of a complete novel waiting for a second draft. Which is to say, a re-write. Call it a step-dad. It lives in my house, but we have a stilted, awkward relationship. Perhaps we can make it work.

(I am also ignored the one complete literary novel, which I have basically chosen to abandon.)

I guess this brings me to the other step-dad and the creepy uncle. Perhaps creepy uncle is too harsh, but what else do you really call a podcast?

Yes. Podcast. And not just one!

Tomorrow, I’ll be recording with several friends, the topic of which shall remain a mystery, while sometime in March, I will join a Riverdale podcast for one episode to espouse my expertise on Archie Out of Context. By expertise, I mean, I have the blog. That’s it. All the expertise.

But nevertheless, I am excited. After months of slow drudgery and toil, everything happens all at once.

It’s given me a nice push so let’s wait and see about the follow-through….

*Mamma Mia! I was raised on ABBA and I have no shame. But, come on, what other films have such a plot that could in any way engender a line such as the one quoted above? Maybe that long-forgotten Michael Keaton classic Multiplicity if you somehow combined it with that other long-forgotten Michael Keaton classic Mr. Mom? Oh that we lived in such a world.

Like this:

It was a weekend without much in the way of photo documentation. That tends to happen when you’ve planned a long weekend south of the border following the election of a technicolor nightmare. These are all the Instagram hits.

We stopped briefly in Olympia on the way down to Portland. The briefness of that stop was somewhat diminished by the protests in the streets that blocked us from getting back to the car. (Happy to wait.)

Riots in downtown Portland kept us out of the downtown after dark. We humble Canadians don’t want any trouble, you hear? We had a motel north of the City and across the street from a retro tiki bar and an Izakaya, so that kept us fed and watered for Friday and Saturday. Besides that, all we really came for was, let’s face it, Powell’s. My friends, our library grew three sizes that day.

Sunday Funday was back in Seattle, wandering the usual haunts: Pike Place, Space Needle, traffic on the I-5. Brief, beautiful, and something of a farewell tour, it seems….

Like this:

I didn’t join Pottermore for the longest time. My relationship with Harry Potter was intense, but troubled. It oscillated between shameless joy and celebration to cheek-biting scrutiny and critique.

In one past life, I’d enthusiastically dressed up in costume and painted signs, windows, and children’s faces for the midnight releases at the bookstore. In another, I’d spent two semesters engrossed in academic study as I wrote a dissertation critiquing Rowling’s implicit versus explicit ideologies. (Seems pointless now. Ten years later and Tumblr has my thesis covered.)

Anyway, I finally joined Pottermore and had myself sorted. This seemed a needless formality. I was Ravenclaw. I knew it. I had always known it. I was a Ravenclaw, just like I was a Donatello and a Miranda and a George Harrison. There was no reason to doubt it.

In fact, since childhood, a very significant portion of my self-identification stemmed from this very assumption.

But no.

Lo, I am a Slytherin.

I stared at the screen in shock for several moments and then I told Husband, dismayed.

I texted Dr. Roommate. If anyone had insight, it was a medical doctor / my former roommate. Her text back read: “That makes sense.”

What. What, what, WHAT.

How the hell did that make sense?

But the longer I thought about it, layers and layers of self-perception began to peel away. I began to look at not what I did, but why I did.

What had made me think I was Ravenclaw to begin with? Well, I was a bit of a swot and I loved to learn. But did I care about knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself?

I was forced to admit not really.

Rather, I realized that I am aware just how much knowledge there was in the world and I want it all. I want to know everything. I don’t learn something and think “Cute. Add that to the collection,” I think, “How can I use that?”

Even when I was a kid, more than learning things, I wanted to be seen as the “Smart Kid.” It was the one thing that came really easy to me and so that is what I focused on.

I had never thought it possible to be Slytherin because I never saw myself as ambitious. I had always viewed ambition on a macro scale. It was the determination to succeed and the willingness to go to any lengths to achieve that success.

That wasn’t me at all. I stuck with a job I settled with. I give up on things way too easily. When something is hard, I back away. Something in my mind simply shuts to it. I avoid, avoid, avoid.

But once I realized that ambition can also work on a micro scale, then it all snapped into place. Anyone who has ever worked with me in any capacity will realized just how over-the-top organized and perfection-driven I am with something I care about. I’m shrewd. And resourceful. And cunning? At times.

Suddenly, it made sense. It totally fucking did. I was never a Ravenclaw. I was a Slytherin and always had been.

There is a reason I quickly give up on things. It’s not laziness, it’s pragmatism. As soon as I think I can’t do it perfectly, I don’t want to do it at all.

When school got hard to manage, I closed down. I skipped class, I curled up until it went away. When film-making got too frustrating, I stopped doing it. There was something so deeply unsettling about watching dailies and realizing there were imperfections I was never going to be able to correct. I couldn’t handle that.

Perhaps that was why I retreated into writing. That, I could control completely.

And perhaps that is why I sit on so many drafts. If I don’t know how to make it perfect, I can’t let it go. And I can’t let it be anything less than perfect. I’m determined.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Each writer has a different approach to rules. For some, they’re made to be broken, others they are mere guidelines, and even others, they are cliches to be avoided like the plague (guess which one I’m not).

Anyway, advice in general is like excerpts from the bible: people cherrypick what works for them and ignore the rest.

But when you get stuck, you never know what it is that might help get you unstuck. So it’s good to have something to go to. Who knows? Therein may lie your answer.

These Pixar rules, which have been floating around the interwebs for a while, are an excellent go-to. Thus, I thought I’d share it because it made they’ve made their way to my bulletin board of oh-my-god-help-me-now (pictured).

Here we go:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.